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Daily Archives: 14 January, 2008

My blog is very much in its infancy. As such I expect the readership to be small in number. At the moment, my main aim is to build content. – Content that people will find interesting and worth their time.

If this blog becomes “successful”, these early articles will help piece together the history of the site and fill in that extra time when people come to the site and find the newest article too short to fill in a lunchtime at work.

Around mid-December, I got a real shock when I received a comment on one of the articles I’d written. The IP-address was based in Canada and as far as I knew, it wasn’t from anyone I knew personally. The comment was light-on, but seemed in context enough, so I approved Idetrorce and their “Very interesting, but I don’t agree with you” comment. Soon after, it became apparent that my readership had not in fact doubled, but I’d been conned by a spam-bot.

Since then there has been much speculation over who Idetrorce is and what their motives are. Hank “The Ozz” Osborne of www.hoei.com has a sinister thought:

In my humble opinion, this is a pre-attack campaign for a bigger spam campaign that will come in the next few weeks. The comment above would be okay on most blog posts since it is not trying to link people back to a product of service and it is just a polite disagreement
…
If a blogger does not block the email address and user name associated with this comment, then they could be opening themselves up to something much bigger coming down the pipe.

I hope he’s wrong, but it does seem a fairly logical conclusion to draw, given the number of people who have opinions not matching idetrorce’s. In the month or so since idetrorce started disagreeing with bloggers world-wide, he (or she) has managed to attract growing amounts of speculation – people now wondering who idetrorce is… There are now some 431,000 hits on Google.

From the web-browsing I have done, it is apparent that this spam-bot exists in multiple places leading me to the conclusion that it is viral, and not initiated by a single entity with too much bandwidth.

One of the hits now showing up on Google is a link to a user account on “Snowboard mag“. One of the interesting points with this user-account is that it has been active for the same amount of time as these comments have been appearing on people’s blogs. As other bloggers/commenters have pointed out on this one, “This may just be a coincidence”. I’ll let others draw their own conclusions.